Elephants

They look like they shouldn’t exist, but the irony is that they do.  Hannibal may not have known about their infrasonic communication capabilities but he sure knew how to send a message using elephants arrayed in their wartime raiment – think Lord of the Rings battle scene with the elephants, just a wee-bit smaller, but in real life (sometimes real life is smaller than we pretend…sometimes it is much, much bigger).   Elephants have been anthropomorphized and vicariously worshipped (see Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god), carved into stone and wood and seen as talismans, or good-luck charms, and have been poached for their conspicuous ivory tusks.  Billiard balls were originally made of elephant ivory and were thus rare and thereby seen as a status symbol for the elitist rich.  If soccer was/is the poor-man’s sport (all you need is a ball, or something that can function as such and two trash cans…or shoes, rocks, sticks…to function as goal posts) then billiards was the rich-man’s sport; and all because of the elephant.  Odd, that where elephants roam free are some of the most economically disenfranchised places on Earth yet these same elephants used to provide for the opulence of the rich.  You might say actual elephants bridged the gap between the rich and poor better than any people represented by an elephant symbol, or a donkey for that matter.  If you ever see elephants walking through the streets in your city, as I did once, either something has gone massively wrong at the zoo, or you’re really tired and the gray matter between your ears is playing tricks on itself, or, as in my case, the circus has come to town…just be patient, the elephant tamer will come around the corner soon and you will be [mostly] assured you have not lapsed into psychosis.  Similarly, if people can openly parade what used to be considered a form of psychosis and even abomination down your street, then either something has gone massively wrong in the collective moral compass…or the proverbial circus has come to town.